17348: On Perceived Brands’ Icy Responses To ICE.

 

Advertising Age published a perspective cautioning brands targeting Latino consumers to not ignore how ICE impacts lives in the segment. In short, the author thinks brands should avoid staying silent and playing it safe when communities face pressures.

 

It’s a debatable proposition, as brands don’t necessarily benefit from taking political stances. Indeed, there are many examples of classic fails when brands publicly advocated for causes.

 

Sure, Archbishop Desmond Tutu declared, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

 

But such leaders didn’t have to contend with brand destructors like President Donald J. Trump, the Gaslighter-in-Chief behind ICE.

 

Brand silence is not necessarily siding with oppressors. Rather, it can be a sign of respect, in terms of standing clear of situations where brands have no business, so to speak.

 

Why brand silence isn’t a safe strategy when communities are under pressure

 

By God-is Rivera

 

Every major brand briefing seems to start the same way lately: Hispanic and Latinx consumers are our fastest-growing segment. The data backs it up.

 

Nielsen reports that Hispanic households represent about 14.7% of U.S. households but account for 15% of total consumer spending and 23% of U.S. dollar growth in retail. Their impact is outsized relative to their population size.

 

But there’s a glaring disconnect between how aggressively brands are pursuing Hispanic consumers and how little they’re acknowledging the lived reality of that community.

 

Today, families are navigating fear and instability due to ICE. Cultural identity is being politicized. People are making daily decisions about where to shop, travel, work, or even leave their homes under conditions many marketers have chosen to treat as “off-limits” for brand engagement.

 

You cannot build sustainable growth with a community you refuse to fully see. Here’s how to back your brand with values that resonate:

 

Growth without context is not a strategy

 

When brands say Hispanic consumers are their growth engine while ignoring the pressures shaping their lives, it reveals a dangerous assumption that purchasing power is disconnected from lived experience.

 

Everyone knows the meme-able Jet2holidays audio that became synonymous with travel fails. The brand got in on the joke and leaned in appropriately, engaging with the moment and expanding cultural relevance well beyond its traditional audience.

 

But when the same audio was later used in content depicting immigration enforcement and detainees being transported, Jet2Holidays was abruptly pulled into a far more serious conversation. They were prepared. The company responded quickly, publicly distancing itself from the usage.

 

Brands that pursue growth without understanding how cultural meaning travels, especially in volatile moments, leave themselves vulnerable to being defined by contexts they didn’t plan for. And if they don’t respond to the situation in a timely manner, or ignore it, it can be a recipe for brand-building disaster.

 

Silence is being mistaken for brand safety

 

Many marketers believe the safest move right now is to stand still. Say nothing. Delay campaigns. Shelve anything that might be perceived as risky.

 

But recent examples suggest the opposite.

 

After facing intense backlash over Pride-related merchandise, Target scaled back displays in certain markets, framing the decision as a move to protect employee and customer safety. The reaction among many consumers—particularly younger and multicultural audiences—was swift. For some, the pullback signaled retreat rather than protection. Boycotts and social media protests have cost the retailer.

 

When brands retreat entirely, consumers are far less charitable than brands expect.

 

Hispanic consumers are also more likely to research corporate policies and participate in boycotts based on a brand’s stance, with 51% participating in at least one boycott according to a study by Numerator.

 

Your fastest-growing consumer is also your most attuned

 

Hispanic consumers are deeply attuned to brand values. Further research from Numerator shows 60% of Hispanic shoppers say they would stop buying from brands that don’t reflect their values.

 

Nike has long understood that growth with multicultural audiences requires consistency in beliefs. When the brand has taken public positions aligned with its stated values, it has weathered backlash while maintaining long-term loyalty, particularly among younger, diverse consumers. While not every move has been universally praised, Nike’s audience understands what the brand stands for.

 

That matters deeply to Hispanic consumers. These audiences don’t expect brands to speak on everything. They expect them not to disappear when values are tested.

 

This moment requires cultural readiness, not crisis comms

 

Too many brands are still relying on outdated crisis playbooks. What’s required now is cultural readiness. Your brand needs to understand communities before moments erupt, to know which voices matter, and to make decisions anchored in real values.

 

From its response to global refugee crises to its clear stance against discrimination on the platform, Airbnb has invested in systems, policies, and partnerships that allow it to act quickly when cultural moments arise. These decisions were enabled by groundwork laid well before public pressure mounted.

 

Companies that have invested in this kind of readiness move differently. They respond with clarity because they’ve already done the work of understanding who they are and who they serve. But readiness doesn’t always have to be defensive. It can recognize moments of positive cultural momentum, such as HRC’s #LoveWins, and grow by showing up in ways that feel timely.

 

Growth is a relationship, not an extraction model

 

The Hispanic and Latinx community represents an enormous opportunity, but opportunity is not a one-way transaction. Growth without care is not growth. The brands that will win the future are not the ones that waited for the moment to pass.

 

They recognized a simple truth: When the community is under pressure, business as usual no longer works.

 

God-is Rivera is chief strategy officer at Burrell Communications Group

12589: Raining On 72andSunny.

Adweek reported 72andSunny is the latest hypocrite to launch a new division hyping brand citizenship. The White advertising agency’s forays into do-gooder dreck include campaigns for Truth and mentoring—which are eclipsed by do-bad bullshit for clients like Carl’s Jr. “The piece that was missing in all of this is the connection to culture, which is where 72andSunny is at,” said 72andSunny wonk Jim Moriarty. “We have ideas and the purpose of causes, the scale of business and a connection to culture.” Hard to imagine anything more ridiculous than a White advertising agency claiming to have a connection to culture.

Can 72andSunny Convince Brands That Good Works Will Drive Sales?

Nonprofit exec Jim Moriarty heads new practice

By Noreen O’Leary

72andSunny is launching a new brand citizenship practice that aims to tie good works to marketers’ bottom-line results. Nonprofit veteran Jim Moriarty is heading the effort after serving nearly 10 years as chief of the San Clemente, Calif.-based Surfrider Foundation, which he helped build into the largest nonprofit devoted to coastal protection.

Equally important to the MDC Partners agency is Moriarty’s background as a tech entrepreneur and marketer whose business experience includes a post as vp, marketing at SAP.

72andSunny’s move leans into the trend of brands (and their agencies) embracing larger causes in the name of corporate social responsibility. Some agencies do this piece meal (think Droga5 and its Tap Project for Unicef), while others have units devoted to it. And then there are entire agencies like Galewill Design and Fearless—Alex Bogusky’s latest venture—that specialize in this type of marketing.

John Boiler, 72andSunny’s CEO, underscored the need for brand citizenship practices to be hard-wired into a company’s sales goals.

“This has traditionally been embedded into CSR [corporate social responsibility] or the CEO’s pet projects,” he said. “We have this opportunity with a new audience, millennials, who have a deeper, more meaningful relationship with brands. How does this drive growth? If you don’t have it plugged into the financial engine of your company, it’s going to be the first thing that gets cut.”

Launching the practice formalizes the kind of work 72andSunny has been doing for socially-minded brands. It’s the agency behind the Legacy Foundation’s “Truth” campaign to end smoking, Benetton’s “Unhate” campaign and Google’s “Made With Code” push to get girls involved in coding.

Boiler emphasized the need for marketers to make long-term commitments to such programs after identifying sustainable products and services that fit with their brands. “Green-wash” or “pink-wash” one-offs don’t do much good and risk cynical responses from consumers, he said.

72andSunny’s new brand citizenship initiative will be embedded within each agency brand team and baked into larger marketing programs. “Jim’s not a free-standing silo. He’ll use the same agency brand people we use, bring the same brand insights they use, whether it’s [clients like] Samsung or Tillamook,” Boiler explained.

Moriarty said his decision to move out of the nonprofit space and into the agency world comes down to scale and cultural relevance with a digitally connected consumer, of any age, who has taken on the same interest in the social causes once considered to be the purview of just millennials. He said that while there are 2 million nonprofits in the U.S., they’re not building scale. Marketers, on the other hand, continually scale their business but don’t know how to implement good works.

“The piece that was missing in all of this is the connection to culture, which is where 72andSunny is at,” Moriarty said. “We have ideas and the purpose of causes, the scale of business and a connection to culture.”

11954: Cause Marketing From Hypocrites.

Adweek reported on the trend of advertising agencies showing interest in cause marketing. Apparently, “the emergence of the millennials”—an audience with do-gooder tendencies—helped motivate the integration of cause marketing into agency service offerings. Popular causes include environmental affairs, feminist issues, and LGBT rights. Now, what makes this all so despicable is Madison Avenue’s historic willingness to service clients who have hurt the environment (e.g., Dow, BP, Monsanto, etc.). More outrageous is the industry’s continuing discriminatory practices—especially against women and minorities. To top it off, advertising agencies have admitted cluelessness when trying to insert millennials into their ranks. Any agency selling expertise in cause marketing should first be required to publicly display their records regarding any of the topics above. Otherwise, clients should have a cause for concern.

Agencies Increase Focus on Cause Marketing

Young & Rubicam’s Inspire practice is latest example

By Erik Oster

Cause marketing is a growing trend in advertising, as agencies seek to align the brands they represent with social causes customers care about. The growing agency focus on cause marketing is now larger than ever, as evidenced by WPP’s Young & Rubicam Group’s decision to open a practice called Young & Rubicam Group Inspire entirely devoted to advertising with a cause.

Young & Rubicam Inspire is “drawing upon employees at several of the more than a dozen units of the Young & Rubicam Group, among them the public relations agencies Burson-Marsteller and Cohn & Wolfe, the branding agency Landor Associates, the public affairs agency Penn Schoen Berland, the digital agency VML, the direct marketing agency Wunderman and, of course, the advertising agency Y&R,” reported The New York Times. The new practice already has a presence online and on Twitter, and Young & Rubicam has been considering forming such a practice for three years, according to chairman and CEO Peter Stringham. Stringham told The New York Times that the realization that such a practice was necessary was accelerated by “the emergence of the millennials,” now seemingly advertising’s favorite target demographic, adding that “what the younger generation does washes back into the general population.”

He pointed to Trish Wheaton, managing partner for global new business at Y&R, as the principal advocate for forming the new practice. Wheaton identified the goal of the organization as meeting consumers’ “high expectations about the companies they do business with and the brands they will be loyal to,” while offering “a multidisciplinary approach that is unique, powerful.” While the practice is starting small in its early stages, Wheaton is hopeful that it will grow over time. “Right now, we’re pulling together teams that have expertise to work on a given initiative,” she said. “In due course, we would hope we will be successful enough to have some dedicated full-time employees.”

Young & Rubicam Inspire is the latest example showing that cause marketing can no longer be ignored. Others include Havas PR’s recent Havas Worldwide Climate Practice and Publicis Groupe’s recent acquisition of Salterbaxter, which The New York Times describes as “a consultancy that specializes in advising marketers and brands on sustainability.”

Popular causes in advertising include environmental concerns, feminist issues, and LGBT rights. Pride month saw a wealth of campaigns from brands including Burger King, YouTube and Lucky Charms. Female empowerment campaigns included Dove’s award-winning “Real Beauty Sketches” campaign and Always’ recent viral success “Like A Girl.” Criticism surrounding another Dove campaign, “Beauty Patches,” demonstrates the hazards of cause marketing: appearing insincere, or even tone-deaf and offensive.

Consumers have a natural skepticism about brands allying themselves with causes, and it takes tact to appear to not be using the cause solely for financial gain. Environmental ads are routinely labeled “greenwashing,” with Coca-Cola a notorious offender in the eyes of many groups. The terms “pinkwashing” and “rainbow washing” have also sprung up, to describe ads that capitalize on women’s issues and LGBT issues. As cause marketing becomes more prevalent, consumer skepticism will only increase and such campaigns will need to be handled with expert care on the part of advertisers, and backed by meaningful initiatives from brands.

As Stringham put it, “People trying to pull the wool over shareholders’ eyes or consumers’ eyes is not something we want to take part in. There is nothing we can do that masks the truth.”

11938: Discriminating Campaign.

Discrimination feels far worse than HIV…? Feel free to debate.

From Ads of the World.

11680: Y&R U.K. B.S.

This campaign from Y&R in the U.K. is rather annoying when you realize that a kid from Belize has a better chance of curing cancer, solving global warming or becoming the next MLK than landing a job at Y&R in the U.K.

From Ads of the World.

10723: Give Gifts Of Freedom.

Don’t mean to criticize the efforts of International Justice Mission, but placing an image of beautiful children against copy about slavery, sex trafficking and violence seems odd. Regardless, make a contribution if you can.

10678: The Breast Campaign Ever…?

From USA TODAY…

Sexy breast cancer campaigns anger many patients

By Liz Szabo, USA TODAY

Campaigns like Feel Your Boobies and Save the Ta-Tas demean women and trivialize the disease, critics say.

Many breast cancer survivors say a crop of pink-ribbon campaigns have hit a new low—by sexualizing breast cancer.

An online porn site this month has been using breast cancer to increase its Web traffic by offering to donate 1 cent for every 30 views of its videos. The intended recipient for the donation, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, rejected the offer and instructed the site to stop using its name.

Yet pornographers are only the most extreme example of a disturbing trend: using sex to sell breast cancer—or simply get attention, say Gayle Sulik, author of Pink Ribbon Blues. Sulik, who recently lost a friend to the disease, notes that magazines and advertising campains now routinely use topless young women to illustrate a disease whose average victims are in their 60s.

“I don’t see the porn site to be much different from the ‘Feel your boobies’ T-shirts,” says Sulik, referring to the Pennsylvania-based Feel Your Boobies Foundation. “It sexually objectifies women, trivializes breast cancer … and uses the objectified woman as window dressing for the profit-making machine.”

Newer cancer groups are embracing slogans such as “Save the Ta-Tas” and “I Love Boobies” in the name of humor and reaching out to a younger, less conservative audience. Other groups say they’re trying to stand out from the crowd of public service announcements that arrive every October, during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

A poster for the “Save 2nd Base” fundraiser at Tao restaurant in Las Vegas last month, for example, depicted a curvy model in a string bikini, noting “everyone in pink bathing suits receives open bar.” An online version of the ad went viral, spread by outraged cancer survivors. The Las Vegas restaurant did not return phone calls for this story.

Although proceeds were to benefit Komen, the cancer group’s spokeswoman Andrea Rader says Komen hasn’t heard how much was raised, and won’t accept the donation. Rader says the Las Vegas restaurant was supposed to get Komen’s approval before launching the ads, but did not. “We would never have approved that,” Rader says. Rader notes that Komen, which has been criticized for its “cause marketing” partnerships with companies such as KFC, disapproves of coy language for body parts. “We just say ‘breasts,’” Rader says.

Breast cancer survivor Kathi Kolb used her skill with computer graphics to create an alternative “2nd Base” poster on her blog, the Accidental Amazon. Kolb’s version makes the bikini model look more like a real cancer patient: with a catheter port in her chest, a prosthesis in her bra and a compression sleeve on her arm to prevent swelling.

“It’s thinly disguised prurience,” says Kolb, 58. “The average guy may be moderately obsessed with breasts, but any guy who’s ever known any woman with breast cancer, the last thing he thinks is that breast cancer is sexy.” b Kolb says she’s been disgusted by sexy breast cancer campaigns for years, noting that many companies are manipulating customers’ compassion for commercial gain. But this year, she says, “is worse than ever.”

But Kimmy McAtee, spokeswoman for the Keep A Breast Foundation, says its “I Love Boobies!” campaign aims to “speak to young people in their own voice about a subject that is often scary and taboo.” T-shirts and bracelets “speak directly to our target audience in a way that is authentic, inspiring and refreshing. We always want to take a positive approach to breast cancer awareness, rather than a funny or sexy one.”

Even mainstream groups, such as the American Cancer Society, are using humor to get their message across. “It’s OK to look at our chests,” the society announces, with videos showing close-ups of women’s chests. On a site called makingstrideswalk.org/boobs, the society announces that a fundraising walk “was created to focus on breasts, and women are glad their chest has our undivided attention.”

The American Cancer Society says the “boobs” video was created to get people’s attention. In a written statement, the society said, “People are exposed to a wide variety of breast cancer information during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, and this video was intended to break through the clutter to capture the attention of social media users, who we want to encourage to spread the word about an important message: empowering women to take control of their breast health and fight back in their communities.”

Breast cancer survivor Lani Horn, 41, from Nashville, says these groups are missing the point. “All of us are really fed up,” Horn says. “Save the tatas? No, save the women. A lot of us had to give up our tatas to live.” Read the full story here.

10670: War Child Toys With Stereotypes.

Hate to diss a noble and worthy cause, but not impressed with this War Child spot. Did a child conceive and produce it? The video opens with all the stereotypes addressed by Mama Hope—before spinning off in a completely nonsensical direction. Would willingly offer a generous donation to make it stop.

10608: Wondering About Alex Bogusky.

Alex Bogusky’s latest advertising effort—“The Real Bears”—takes on soft drink manufacturers in fairly stereotypical fashion. That is, iconic advertising imagery is twisted against FDA-style factoids baring the dangers of consuming sugary beverages. It’s the kind of propaganda one might expect from Adbusters or any consumer watchdog group blessed with a decent production budget.

Criticism of the concept or execution aside, haters are already lining up to brand Bogusky a hypocrite for biting the hands that used to feed him. Not too sure the complaints are valid. First, Bogusky has always used his craft for causes. The man was instrumental in launching the truth campaign to slap Big Tobacco. He also authored The 9-inch “Diet”; plus, Baked In certainly hinted at his revolutionary bent. Joining the Made Movement is another indicator of his political nature. No, there’s nothing schizophrenic about his recent actions. Indeed, it could potentially be argued that Bogusky was never comfortable collaborating with corporate advertisers, and ultimately opted for a divorce. He’s not the first person in history to undergo a philosophical reengineering.

What remains to be seen is if Bogusky will ever use his radical skills to address the dearth of diversity still common in the advertising industry. Going up against his former employers is one thing. Does Bogusky have the courage, conviction and cultural competence to confront his former coworkers and peers?

10557: Baby Bias…?

Why is this Baby Can Wait campaign only depicting Black teens?

9724: Greenpeace Is Cold.

Leave it to Greenpeace to present a message on climate change with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. But did anyone else initially think the polar bears might have suffered death from drinking too much Coca-Cola?


From Ads of the World.

9195: Bar Hunger? No, Barf Hunger.

Sorry, but this Snickers Bar Hunger cause marketing campaign is odd. The print ad headline reads, “For Millions Of Families, ‘What’s For Dinner?’ Has Become, ‘What Should We Give Up To Afford Dinner?’” Um, how about giving up impulse purchases like Snickers?